Byapiaaealy When I began this book, I knew some readers would take trace” for a tragic noun, a synonym for conflict and isolation, Race is not such a terrible word for me. Maybe because | am skep tical by nature. Maybe because my nature is already mixed. The word race encourages-me to remember the influ- ence of eroticism on history. For that is what race memorial- izes. Within any discussion of race, there lurks the possibility of romance.xiv « Preface re that does not isolate them i oo because they fear a futu 4 wn future, the most dangerous actor might likely he th le bro} conversant in alternate currents, literatures fe » Com. cosmopolite, puter programs. The cosmopolite may come to hate his brown. ness, his facility, his indistinction, his mixture; the cosmopolite may yearn for a thorough religion, ideology, or tribe. Many days, I left my book to wander the city, to discover the city outside my book was comically browning. Walking down Fillmore Street one afternoon, I was enjoying the smell of salt, the brindled pigeons, brindled light, when a conversation over- took me, parted around me, just as I passed the bird-store window: Two girls. Perhaps sixteen. White, Anglo, whatever. ‘Tottering on their silly shoes. Talking of boys. The one girl say- ing to the other: .. . His complexion is so cool, this sort of light—well, not that light . . . I realized my book will never be equal to the play of the young. . ... Sort of reddish brown, you know... The other girl nodded, readily indicated that she did know. But still Connois- seur Ni ee: ona One sought to bag her simile... . Like a Sugar eee know that candy bar? . nn decades ago, I wrote Hunger of Memory, ee Le a scholarship boy. Ten years later, ‘ton, | wrote about the i . Renctieatiaslaa i influence of Mexican ethnicity o, —— is volume completes a trilogy on ao Public life and my private life. Brown returns me American ave earlier described. I believe i eo . I believe it is possib! ‘© years [ gle life thrice, j le to 5 ‘thrice, if from three isolations: Class. egfsttibe @ sin. Nicity Rac, 2. ‘ the autobiog- in Days of Obliga-Preface » xi me months ago, a ren : diced to me that Hispanics will bese Sociologist ‘pre- the United States. (What the Sicilian had been for inca . century America, the Colombian would become for the oe first century.) 7 His prediction seems to me insufficient because it does not account for the influence of Hispanics on the geography of the American imagination. Because of Hispanics, Americans are coming to see the United States in terms of a latitudinal vec- tor, in terms of south-north, hot-cold; a new way of placing our- selves in the twenty-first century. America has traditionally chosen to describe itself as an east-west country. I grew up on the east-west map of America, facing east. I no longer find myself so easily on that map. In middle age (also brown, its mixture of loss and capture), I end up on the shore where Sir Francis Drake first stepped onto California. I look toward Asia. ‘As much as I celebrate the browning of America (and | do), Ido not propose an easy optimism. The book's last chapter was completed before the events of September 11, 2001, and now will never be complete. The chapter describes the combustible dangers of brown; the chapter annotates the tragedies it antic- ipated. I think brown marks a reunion of peoples, an end to ancient wanderings, Rival cultures and creeds conspire with Spring to create children of a beauty, perhaps of a harmony, previously cao Or long forgotten. Even so, the terrorist and the eam in solitude of purity and of the straight linexii * Preface want paradox ina book. In which case, you he You may not pure author. Je in the United States assog;. better seek a Jor most peop” Brown is the co! Latin America. mple, there is no browner smear in the American imagination than the Rio Grande. No adjective has attached itself more often to the Mexican in America than “dirty’—which ] assume gropes toward the simile “dirt-like,” indicating dense concentrations of melanin. what makes me brown Iam dirty, all right. In Latin America, is that I am made of the conquistador and the Indian. My brown is a reminder of conflict. And of reconciliation. In my own mind, what makes States is that I am Richard Rodriguez. my surname marry England and Spain, North of the U.S.-Mexico border, brown app’ color of the future. The adjective accelerates, becomes a verb: ‘outh of the border, brown sinks back ate with Apart from stool $2 e brown in the United My baptismal name and Renaissance rivals. ears as the m “America is browning.” S into time. Brown is time. In middle chapters, I discuss the ways Hispanics brown an ‘America that traditionally has chosen to describe itself as black- anche: I salute Richard Nixon, the dark father of Hispani- cite Bae my Hispanic chapters, as I think of them—the chi ers I originally supposed were going to appear first in this anal a Meee more elementary considerations. I mean the meet. pal pee air anata . Red. Black. White. The founding palette, onialPreface MPURITY. a color that is not a singular color, not olor produced by careless |. write of blood that stance BROWN ASL I write of tan expected result, but a c: by accident; by two or several e of brown as complete freedom of sub: a strict rec- ipe, no desire, even is blended. I writs and narrative. I extol impurity. [eulogize a literature that is sion, irony, parodox—ha!—pleasure. I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America. Brown bleeds through the strai line separating black from white, Brown forms at the border of contradiction (the ability of lan- guage to express two Or several things at once, the ability of bod- t once). suffused with brown, with allu- ight line, unstaunchable—the for example. Brown confuses. ies to experience two or several things at It is that brown faculty I uphold by attempting to write brownly. And I defy anyone who tries to unblend me or to say what is appropriate to my voice. You will often find brown in this book as the cement be- tween leaves of paradox.